Stuff that didn’t seem weird at the time but when you tell someone younger they think it’s nuts

[MildGreenDairyLiquid]

Just that really.

The other day I explained to my 11 year old niece that when I was at junior school we used to have a small bottle of milk with a straw every morning, and she looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

When neighbours of my secondary school complained about pupils smoking in the streets outside their houses, the head told us he would give these neighbours disposable cameras.

Another flying toy I came across in 2003, which an autistic boy I worked with once bought (with his mum's help), and I was amazed it was sold, and was probably once quite popular: a model rocket (not a firework) that could actually take off, and go quite a long way up. The fuel for it was in a cylinder behind the counter, and strictly for sale to over 18s only. Some models had a 110-size camera attached (how quaint), so it could take photos while up in the air. Another forerunner to drones.

Writing and sending Memos at work.

Internal post - those green envelopes with boxes on the front to write the recipient's name, which you'd just reuse over and over. The internal postman used to do the rounds of the office, collect all the internal post, take it to the internal post room and then do a round delivering.

Thinking about it now, it's bonkers - why I couldn't just take my memo (or whatever else was in the envelope) down the stairs to HR, or wherever, I can't think.

I remember all this very clearly from a company I worked at from 1997-2003, which doesn't seem that long ago...

Doing music and movement at school to the actual radio.

Charity boxes in the home, especially those red plastic ones which said "to be a Christian is to be a missionary". My mum used to threaten that if she found our pocket money lying around, she would put it in the poor box.

Going down to Blockbuster to check my emails, which was also the nearest INTERNET CAFE!!

I remember this! You used to be able to search by celebrity, so if you wanted to you could buy whatever Britney Spears or Jennifer Lopez had been seen wearing lately.

Staff used to smoke in the staff room at school.

sharpclawedkitten · Today 09:00

? I see kids doing paper rounds now! I was driving behind a kid with a newspaper sack on a bike this very morning!

Have you? What area, roughly, are you in?

I had a morning round in 1983 and my dad decided that I should have a weekly one for the Whitley Bay Guardian freesheet. 400 papers for £2! And all had to be delivered on a Thursday and I had to share the money with my 2 older sisters, who didn't have to do anything for it. It used to take from 6pm till after 10 pm and my dad got pissed off, wanting to know where I'd been!

It only lasted a month, till I had a wobbler and refused point blank.

LOL!

Oh yeah!!! I forgot about those! What a throwback! Thanks for reminding me

Oh, the excitment when the teacher wheeled out the massive television so you could watch a schools' TV programme!

Having to queue for the cinema - the queue for ET was epic, and an event in itself.

Properly knowing your bank manager. I used to take mine a bottle of sherry every Christmas when I was a student/first started work. We'd have a little chat and he'd tell me off for sending letters asking for things like an overdraft for 'sex drugs and rock and roll'. He also had a framed photo of one of my cuddly toys that I had sent him, telling him I had a wine habit and a stuffed monkey to support. When I took him a retirement gift in my late 20s, he said he could retire happy, knowing my finances were in order.

No McDonalds, only Wimpy, and milkbars. There was still a milkbar in Welshpool until the 1990s IIRC, really strange places!

Renting televisions. And dads being able to repair televisions.

Dad spending every Saturday morning under the car with his Haynes manual.

Spending hours playing 'Pong'. We thought we were so high tech!

Getting internet in 1995 and spending about 2 excited hours waiting to fully download a picture of Socks the Whitehouse cat.

Sitting with a washing up sponge and sticking green shield stamps into books, then going to the petrol station to get a set of glasses or whatever. I wonder if anyone did ever save up enough to get a car?

And on Halloween we would have hollowed out turnips, not pumpkins. Trick or treat was much less of a thing than 'penny for the Guy'. What didn't seem weird then, but does in retrospect was that the best bonfire and fireworks was hosted by the local convent.

At primary school we were sent to walk to the Post Office to bank cash from tuck shop.

Oh yes! I also had a Jane Fonda cassette tape to exercise to, and it was only many years later when I got a video that I realised I had not interpreted certain exercises in the way she had intended. But whenever I heat Michael Jackson's 'Wanna be Startin Somethin' it takes me right back to the warm up.

Oh that’s really lovely.

The first email I ever sent was to someone in Uzbekistan. They wanted a copy of our annual report but pdfs hadn’t been invented so it had to go snail mail.

I asked how long it would take for the email to arrive.

‘Four seconds.’

Mind. Blown.

I was that usherette, in the early 90s! I had the tray, didn’t sell cigarettes but used to ask “smoking or non smoking?” when showing people to their seats (smoking was sitting on the left, it wasn’t like there was a barrier between smoking and non smoking). Older teens used to lie about their age to get a child ticket and then ask for a smoking seat.

We had the ad breaks, even though by that time the films weren’t designed to have them, the projectionist just used to stop the film half way through and bring the lights up, to peoples confusion.

The 'Cheese and WIne party' held for the first year 6th formers at my secondary. Circa 1988. West London. We were about 15/16 years old and wild.

.... i mean what could go wrong? 😳

''Lets give all the first year 6th formers free unlimited alcohol on school premises for 3 hours on a friday evening in winter (so dark out)(so you can't see who's passed out on the school field) with only 3 or 4 members of staff to control them''.
Who's idea was this??

Lets start by saying no cheese got eaten.
Lets go on to say that apx 2 hours in DEFCON 1 alert went up and the rest of the staff were called in and teachers had to start driving certain pupils home - priority to those who had lost the ability to walk or speak and have to be peeled off the floor.

The police arrived.

That night was the first time i got so drunk i couldn't feel anything when i fell over. And i fell over a.lot that night. I was 15. I actually fell arse over tit in the middle of the road outside the school gates during our 'escape the police' attempt. Busy road. About 10 of us did just escape into the night ....

Can you imagine that these days?

To be honest I thought it still was this!

I’m finding it remarkable how much better I feel since I cut out trans fats, white sugar and most wheat from my diet. I’m old enough to remember the days before most UFPs. Heading back there, fast.

And make a lovely daube of beef!

My dd has recently given up her paper round. They do still exist but rare.
Massive cable extension wire thing plugged into the phone socket in the lounge, out the room , across the hallway, up the stairs, into the spare room and plug not the computer. Do what you need to do in internet asap and then unplug it all and put phone back in. There was a very real chance that in the space of an hour you could miss a landline call whilst you did this. Nobody has called my landline this month.

I had a Saturday job in an independent toy shop in my mid-teens in the ‘80s.
There were about three staff working each day, we all smoked behind the counter.

🤣

Not being able to fast forward the ads. I found myself trying to explain the concept of real time broadcast TV the other night to my six year old who was incensed that we couldn't just zip through the ads to see who had won star Baker on the bake off this week 😂

When I started working as a trade journalist in the 90s -

• Nobody had internet or email
• Press releases arrived by fax or post.
• Contributors sent copy on floppy discs and asked you to send the disc back. Or they sent the copy as typewritten pages and you had to re type it into the computer.
• If you needed a photo for your news story it had to come by post or courier, or you had to go down to the physical photo library and say “have you got a picture of a chocolate bar/ the PM/ Woolworths”
• If you needed background on a story rather than Googling it you had to send a request to the in house library and they would send you up all the cuttings they had on that subject
• ”News” was gathered by regularly phoning everyone on your contact list and asking what was going on
• Or by going for massive boozy lunches with your “contacts”